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Saturday, June 24, 2017

The Elsevier-SciHub story

I blogged earlier today why I try to publish all my work gold Open Access. My ImpactStory profile shows I score 93% and note that with that 10% of the scientists in general score in that range. But then again, some publisher do make it hard for us to publish gold Open Access. And then if STM industries spreads FUD for their and only their good ("Sci-Hub does not add any value to the scholarly community.", doi:10.1038/nature.2017.22196), I get annoyed. Particularly, as the system makes young scientists believe that transferring copyright to a publisher (for free, in most cases) is a normal thing to do.

As said, I have no doubt that under current copyright law it was to be expected that Sci-Hub was going to be judged to violate that law. I also blogged previously that I believe copyright is not doing our society a favor (mind you, all my literature is copyrighted, and much of it I license to readers allowing them to read my work, copy it (e.g. share it with colleagues and students), and even modify it, e.g. allowing journals to change their website layout without having to ask me). About copyright, I still highly recommend Free Culture by Prof. Lessig (who unfortunately did not run for presidency).

To get a better understand of Sci-Hub and its popularity (I believe gold Open Access is the real solution), I looked at what literature was in Wikidata, using Scholia (wonderful work by Finn Nielsen, see arXiv). I added a few papers and annotated papers with their main subject's. I guess there must be more literature about Sci-Hub, but this is the "co-occuring topics graph" provided by Scholia at the time of writing:

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This blog deals with chemblaics in the broader sense. Chemblaics (pronounced chem-bla-ics) is the science that uses computers to solve problems in chemistry, biochemistry and related fields. The big difference between chemblaics and areas such as chem(o)?informatics, chemometrics, computational chemistry, etc, is that chemblaics only uses open source software, open data, and open standards, making experimental results reproducible and validatable. And this is a big difference!

About Me

Assistant professor at the Dept of Bioinformatics - BiGCaT at NUTRIM, Maastricht University, studying biology at an unsupervised and atomic level. Open Science is my main hobby resulting in participation in, among many others, Bioclipse, CDK and WikiPathways. ORCID:0000-0001-7542-0286. Posts on G+ are personal.

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